[HN Gopher] Cinepaint: The long forgotten GIMP fork that once po... ___________________________________________________________________ Cinepaint: The long forgotten GIMP fork that once powered the cinema industry Author : marcodiego Score : 64 points Date : 2021-09-18 18:43 UTC (4 hours ago) (HTM) web link (cinepaint.bigasterisk.com) (TXT) w3m dump (cinepaint.bigasterisk.com) | autoliteInline wrote: | Weird, never heard of it. | | Does it overlap with Discreet or Softimage stuff? | Wistar wrote: | No. Cinepaint was merely a raster paint program with 16-bit | colorspace which made it suitable for feature work. It didn't | have programmable animation capability but did have onion | skinning so that cel-style animation could be done, albeit | painfully. | | Edit: Oh, and that, very importantly, ran on SGI/IRIX. | autoliteInline wrote: | Oh. More like Lumena (Time Arts/John Dunn). | | Amazing. | teruakohatu wrote: | According to its sourceforge page, Cinepaint is still being | maintained. The last update was in May. | ithinkso wrote: | Tangential but, Sourceforge, that's a name I haven't heard in a | long time... How are they doing? | djcapelis wrote: | Not great. Git and then GitHub ate their lunch and then they | ended up so desperate they did this: https://www.reddit.com/r | /OutOfTheLoop/comments/3aajjs/what_i... | | So that pretty much caused whoever still used it to stop. | They sold to a new company who stopped that practice but I | can't think of many projects that want a managed SCM that | felt there was any reason to switch to sourceforge from | GitHub or gitlab after that, which is where most projects | have ended up one way or another. | | Their new owners now call sourceforge a place for "business | software" which seems like hopefully the final stage which | will bring sourceforge's long slow decline to its end. | | Edit: it looks like their latest owner (2020) is slashdot. | So. I guess they will capably oversee its continued slide to | irrelevance. | [deleted] | Groxx wrote: | Yeah, the moment they started bundling crapware, the fall | was _extremely_ fast. It 's a hosting site that's fairly- | strongly correlated with technically-adept users: burn them | like this and they are _never_ coming back, and they 'll | loudly tell everyone they know to do likewise. | pwdisswordfish8 wrote: | "Their latest owner is Slashdot" is true, but it's true in | the sense that the company that both Sourceforge and | Slashdot _became_ Slashdot. | mlinksva wrote: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CinePaint and | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SourceForge each seem to be | reasonably up to date. | marcodiego wrote: | It is interesting to think that GIMP once had such a lead but | today is playing catch-up. Blender and Krita area canonical | examples success stories in the are now. | mixmastamyk wrote: | Unfortunately, there's no info here about why it fell out of | favor. Only up to the rename. | rleigh wrote: | The inability of the GIMP developers to work with others to | incorporate needed features was the primary reason. | | Look at the difference between how different open-source | projects operate. Some foster collaboration and encourage | outside contributions, e.g. Linux. Others are completely | insular and barely tolerate it. The GIMP maintainers fall into | the latter category. Unless you're part of the inner clique, | you won't get anything merged. | | It's kind of sad that the Cinepaint people got several paid | staff to lift the GIMP functionality to the point it had very | high-profile commercial use with some really useful features, | and yet the GIMP developers were too stubborn to acknowledge | this effort and work with them to get the functionality into | the GIMP core. | | Sadly, this is not unique to the GIMP. I, and other commercial | developers, had exactly the same experience with GTK+ and GNOME | libraries. The developers wanted to hack on their pet thing, | ignore outside contributions, and this is simply not compatible | with commercial timelines and realities. But it can be, and it | can work very well, for projects which are willing to engage | with outside work. It can work out to be very mutually | beneficial with some give and take on both sides. I was on the | GIMP mailing lists at the time and followed this saga for | years. It's a crying shame it was deliberately ignored. | [deleted] | diskzero wrote: | We used it at DreamWorks Animation, but also had our own | various 2D bitmap editing tools. | | I can think of a few reasons it fell out of favor in the 3D | animated film space. Any process that required artists to come | in after a render was complete is bad news for your budget. The | more you can accomplish inside of your surfacing and lighting | tools, the better. | | For surface creation, artists in general would prefer to use | tools that they are familiar with, and if your pipeline can | support export from Photoshop, then that is they are going to | want to use. | | While there are still a lot of proprietary tools in use for | lighting and rigging, the days of completely proprietary tool | chains and pipelines are over. Software suites of no longer | running on SGI boxes with a lot of proprietary formats. A lot | of work has been done on interchange formats so it is easier to | get your data in and out Maya, Photoshop, etc. | thanatos519 wrote: | My favourite memory of Cinepaint was being at a SIGGRAPH | exhibition booth (Silicon Grail's I presume) and seeing how they | were using GIMP/Cinepaint for wire removal in the X-Files movie. | I asked Yosh how the layers dialog looked and he popped it up. It | started loading all of the full-def movie frames to make | thumbnails, then the machine ran out of memory and IRIX crashed! | chrisseaton wrote: | What was considered full definition for digital work on a film | in 1998? | | Toy Story was less than modern HD, yet you can pay extra to | stream it in 4K from Apple! Not sure how that works! | ollifi wrote: | Cineon 2K was 2048x1556 | setpatchaddress wrote: | ISTR that the early Pixar movie were simply rerendered at | higher resolution from the original assets? | pwdisswordfish8 wrote: | What's confusing? They can re-render the scenes from the | original source. At some point in the transition from VHS to | DVD to Blu-Ray, they may have even done a "remastered" re- | release (hiring staff to touch up textures and so on), and if | so, they could make use of that work, too. | chrisseaton wrote: | > they may have even done a "remastered" re-release | | Are you just guessing? | pwdisswordfish8 wrote: | Not guessing anything, because I didn't say it even | happened. | | Whether it happened or not doesn't change that even if | the original theatrical version was 1536x922, re- | rendering for higher resolutions is trivial. | jasonwatkinspdx wrote: | Rerendeirng old cinema cg is anything but trivial. | Production pipelines are incredibly complex and are a | fast moving target. Getting something going again is a | very complex and tedious task of software archeology | against projects that often only had a single company | using them. Many dependencies will be unavailable or | incompatible with current systems. | | When old content that doesn't have a high resolution film | or digital master copy is remastered to HD, it's done | using super resolution tools that do their best to infer | extra detail based on the existing data. | Sesse__ wrote: | Also, often special effects are done as manual one-offs | on top of what comes out of the renderer (with whatever | software package and techniques that happened to fit the | bill for that particular effect); it's not like you can | just type "make" and out comes the movie. It's certainly | _easier_ to do a higher-res version of an animated movie | than a live-action one, but it's still a lot of work. | [deleted] | themodelplumber wrote: | I used Cinepaint all the time back around 2005-2007. You could | work with 3D renders at higher bit depths, which meant a lot when | you were working with a limited-scope FOSS 3D package on a Linux | system in the first place. Much post was done. Thanks to those | who worked on the project! ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-09-18 23:00 UTC)